People
Eric Leonhardt Brown
Eric Leonhardt Brown has been writing and performing music and poetry for nearly two decades. As a singer and songwriter, he formed his first band, Nude Canoe, in 1988 and proceeded to record and produce three albums over the next five years. In 1992 he wrote and recorded an EP with Grasshopper Green, a diverse group of musicians from Dayton, Ohio. Also in 1992, Eric began focusing on writing poetry. He published his first book of poems, All the Kings Men, in 1994. Over the next five years Eric published and edited several volumes of poetry as well as the 13 Moons in Ohio journal which he founded in 1995. In 1999 he published Aching to Bloom, which sold close to 1,500 copies and was strongly influenced by Eric’s mentoring relationship with American poet Robert Bly. In 2001, Eric founded Youth Passage Network, a non-profit organization dedicated to using poetry and music to assist adolescents in the transition from youth into adulthood. In 2004, Eric finished writing Some Stray Strands of Sunlight, his fifth book of poems due to be released in 2006. In August 2005, Eric released a new album of music with jazz bassist Christian Berg entitled Simply Beautiful. Eric serves on the board of directors for the Yellow Springs Kid Playhouse and serves as a senior advisor to Yellow Springs High School. Eric Brown lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio. He is co-founder of Hipgnosis Records, for whom he is a producer and director of marketing.